Corporate sustainability commitments function as forward-looking credibility tokens — when they are quietly retired, the signal is more informative than any press release. Both Google and Microsoft have let their carbon-neutral timelines slip without formal retraction, a pattern that research on the structural nature of the AI emissions problem treats not as a communications failure but as evidence that the targets were incompatible with the infrastructure decisions already made. The question is not whether the labs will revisit those pledges — they will, once political and investor pressure forces the…